


Girl Unknown

by PastaBucket



Category: Silent Hill (Video Game Series)
Genre: Blood, Execution, F/M, Helplessness, Mystery, Psychological Horror, Sleep Sex, mild assplay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-09-19
Packaged: 2019-06-09 22:42:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 14
Words: 5,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15277764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastaBucket/pseuds/PastaBucket
Summary: Girl wakes up, not knowing where she is.





	1. Chapter 1

She spun around with increasing alarm: When did she get here? These surrounding concrete walls, cylindrical and windowless, and this entire room, huge, but void of any furniture. She couldn't remember getting here - just suddenly standing in the middle of it.

She gasped as a heavy bulkhead door creaked open, revealing a man she knew, but couldn't place. He casually walked up to her with a smile.

"Hello.", he said.

"Uh, hi.", she stammered.

He pulled up a chair, seating himself in front of her. "How's it going?"

"I... What is this? Where am I?", she confessed, embarrassed.

"Yes, that's a very good question.", the man concluded thoughfully, his nonchalant calm constrasting her increasing panic.

"Who are you?", she tried again.

"Indeed.", the man answered, leaning back on the chair. "...but don't worry - it'll all come back to you eventually." He curiously observed her facial expressions as he spoke. "...but for now, let's just say that... ...I'm a friend. A very good friend, whom you'll get to know eventually."

She couldn't move. Why couldn't she move?

He rose from his chair, slowly approaching her, thoughtfully placing a hand on her cheek. She wanted to pull back, but she didn't. Her muscles didn't obey her.

"You are so very beautiful.", he said to her, intimately close. "You must have a thousand questions swimming around in that pretty little head of yours right now.". He gently caressed her cheek as he spoke, knowing that she couldn't resist him. "...but it's okay. Take your time, sweetie." His eyes stared into hers, without shame, transfixing her. He leaned in for a soft taste of her lips. Nothing more, before turning away. After a few steps towards the exit, he turned back toward her. "I'll be back when you're ready, but now... ...isn't the time."

She watched him walk to the door and close it behind him, the four metal bars visibly locking in place.

She still couldn't move. She wanted to scream but she couldn't.


	2. Chapter 2

She searched her head for memories, but they were like a swarm of bees - flashes of things that were gone before she could begin to describe them.

Meanwhile the man - mere inches away - curiously studied every twitch of her face.

"I... I'm not supposed to be here.", she concluded. "You took me."

"Yes, I did.", he nodded, casually walking back to his chair.

"You're not a friend."

"Well..." He turned the accusation over in his head, unphased. "It's a matter of perspective."

"No it's not."

He suddenly smiled at her, in recognition. "Ah. There you are. Now THIS is the part about you that I love."

He walked up to her again, with renewed interest. "That narrow mindset, selfassured, like that of a little mouse."

"F-fuck you.", she stammered. "You know nothing about me."

He just cracked an amused smile, before stepping away again. "Ooh... ...you'll find out that I know more about you, than you'll ever want to admit." He looked up at her again: "Tell me, where do you live?"

She... She didn't know. She remembered a house, in the suburbs. Her parent's house. ...and then it was gone.

"I...", she choked, before falling completely silent.

"You don't know, do you?", he asked with almost a tone of pity in his voice.

He casually stared out what had to be a window behind her, judging by the sunlight falling on his face. "Most people remember where they live. ...and yet...", he trailed off.

"You've made your point.", she muttered.

"No, I'm afraid that I haven't. Not yet, anyway. My point... ...is far more complex."

He walked over to her again, at close talking distance. "...but you're safe now. That's all that matters."

She frowned at his words. "Safe?"

He nodded. "Safe. I'm positive that we got everything." He confidently stroked her chin.

"Why won't you tell me anything? What 'everything'?!", she shouted.

The man didn't even blink at her outburst. "In due time, beautiful. Not now. Now you rest."

With those words he walked off to the door again, leaving her all alone.


	3. Chapter 3

She woke up on a bare mattress on the floor, surprised that she could move again.

She was in the same large, cylindrical room as before, but off to the side of it. It looked like a cross between a water cistern and a bunker.

There was a bowl beside her mattress. A dog bowl, bearing her name. A sick joke. There were traces of food in it, but she didn't remember eating from it.

There was also a toilet far off against the opposite wall, looking really out of place without any sort of enclosure. How it got there had to be a marvel of engineering in itself.

This supposed cell, was larger than her apartment - an apartment she couldn't even remember.

The sound of the door startled her, as the man was making his return. It was then she noticed that she was naked. She could just huddle up against the wall as he approached, covering up.

"Well hello there.", he smiled down at her. "Feeling better?"

She just stared at him, unsure at what to say.

"Those walls can be quite rough on the skin.", he pointed out. "You don't want to hurt yourself."

She leaned forward from it, huddling up even tighter.

He kneeled before her, looking straight into her eyes and paying no attention to her body. "Don't worry. I've seen female bodies before. Even yours.", he assured her with a smile. "...but your modesty is charming none the less. I wouldn't want it any other way."

This time, when he reached for her chin, she finally had the ability to reel off from it, guarding it with her own hand. "Don't... Don't touch me!", she spat out.

The man turned it over in his head. "Fair enough." He rose to his feet again, as she went back to guard her exposed tit again. "Boundaries are important after all."

Monsters, and flashes of sharp teeth, flashed through her disoriented memories. Maybe she WAS safe in here. There was something out there, that preyed on humanity.

"You are starting to remember, aren't you?", he noticed her frowned, selfabsorbed expression. "Good."

Then he left her again, leaving her alone to her futile grabbing at memories fluttering about like butterflies around her.


	4. Chapter 4

She slowly stepped through the heavy bulkhead door, and entered a kitchen, as surreal in its placement as the toilet had been. Waking up, she discovered that he had provided her with clothes, and they now sat on her body. She couldn't tell if they were her own or not, but they were now.

The man was busy clutting up vegetables at the sink cutting board. "Hello, sleepyhead. I was wondering when you'd wake up." At first she had thought that he'd left the door open by mistake, and that she would try to escape, but apparently it was quite the opposite.

Seeing a kitchen knife, she seized the opportunity, carefully placing it next to the man's throat without a word. Finally she felt in control.

He reeled back an inch in response, but without much surprise. "Careful with that."

"Tell me why I shouldn't cut you right now.", she growled as best as she could.

"Because you simply don't have it in you. I didn't just take ANYBODY off the street. Instead I chose YOU."

He was right: She couldn't. She ended the stalemate by lowering the knife and he turned to her. "You wouldn't have gotten any answers out of a corpse anyway." He gestured to the dinner table: "Indulge me."

She placed the knife in front of her as they sat down.

"I want some answers.", she demanded. "What's out there?"

"Straight to the point, as always.", he smiled. "I like it."

"Shut up. Tell me.", she growled.

"Very well. Freedom. That's what's out there. Limitless, untamed freedom.", he sighed.

"Make sense, old man!", she said gripping the knife in a display of power.

"Well that's how it started.", he said, looking at the knife in her grip. "At first we were naïve, thinking we always had a right to it, but the truth is...", he leaned forward on his end of the table, staring into her eyes. "...they grew it. ...in a lab."

With those words, her mind was thrust backwards, sent drowning into a numbing darkness amongst wild, hungry beasts, and then there was just black oblivion.

 

When she came to, she was in the center of the large cell again, with the man tending to her head.

"Ah, there you are.", he said. "Let's not do that again, shall we."

"I... I don't...", she mumbled in a drowsy tone.

"No, don't try to speak.", he told her. "There's already been too much excitement for one day already."

"No, but..." Her head was spinning, the vertigo telling her that taking his advice was a sound thing to do.

"Well, you wanted to know 'the truth', and now you know why I can't simply tell it to you. I hope that lesson has been learned, because I don't want to go through all of this again." He was focused on dabbing the side of her head with paper. "We take this at MY pace, knowing that it's also YOUR pace, and then we'll BOTH be happy, alright?" He smiled at her, finally satisfied. The paper in his hand had stains of her blood on it. "Hang in there.", he encouraged her.

 


	5. Chapter 5

She was pretty sure that it was sperm. Semen.

The implications of that made her wince in disgust.

It was leaking out of her, and why she was lying there tasting it to make sure, she couldn't tell. Maybe it was because she'd stopped caring.

He was having sex with her during her blackouts, and somehow this was a familiar trait of his. ...not that it was really him. It was what they had turned him into.

She just sighed to herself, lying there on the mattress, ravaged and alone. She had no idea for how long this had been going on, but she knew that it was beyond both of their control. She passively scooped up the remaining slimy strands of sperm out of her violated pussy, and licked it off her fingers. It didn't taste too bad.

 

She came to again, now on her feet in the middle of the cell.

"Oh, good.", the man said. "Let's begin." He began pacing before her as he spoke. "What I'm going to do now, is the impossible: I'm going to try to explain to you, something that you cannot possibly comprehend, the result being that you won't comprehend it, but that you'll at least feel satisfied with having been given an explanation."

"Was it your sperm, that I found leaking out of my pussy this morning?", she asked him.

He turned to her. Finally something that she'd said had somewhat phased him. ...but only for a brief moment. "Well yes. Yes, I believe it was, yes."

She just looked at him in silence.

"Does this bother you, miss?", he asked.

"Well, I'd like to at least KNOW, you know, if you're gonna...", she said, nodding toward her crotch without elaborating further.

"No.", he said, shaking his head with another smile. "No, you wouldn't. Not yet."

"Oh, come on.", she said in a sarcastically coy tone. "If you're gonna rape me, at least be man enough to give me a chance to resist you."

"We both know that that's not how that works." His tone was angry out of taken offense, and her passive aggression instantly turned into shame. That had been low of her. "We can't always get what we want.", he added.

In a way they were both captives.


	6. Chapter 6

"First, they invented freedom.", he continued. "They sold it to us, saying that we couldn't live without it, and told us that all that we had to do to be free, was obey them. ...and we trusted them, because they were all blaming eachother, so we couldn't really tell that they were all lying to us."

He was right: This was like listening to the ramblings of a madman.

"...and this went on for hundreds of years, and we got so lost in these little games, that we forgot. We forgot the face of true evil." His eyes briefly met hers and like a knife, she remembered.

He paused as she finished wincing from the glimpse. "Did you kill them?", she finally asked, not wanting to know the answer.

"No.", he said. "No, they're still here, I imagine. ...somewhere, in 'towers' like this one...", he said, peering around in the cell. "I'm not a killer, despite what people say about me."

She said nothing. She had trusted them. They looked just like normal human beings, and part of them were.

She had seen the pictures, of what they really were, inside.

"Once we opened the gates to them, we began to lose.", he continued. "We lost everything. Control. Governments. Corporations. Even our own sanity." He paused at those words, staring into some distant corner of his memories. Then he finally turned back to her. "...so this was never really about you. You just got caught up in a much bigger war. Its first casualties."

"I... I'm sorry - I...", she began, but caught herself.

"It's okay.", he told her softly. "I never expected you to. They targeted you specifically so that you wouldn't be capable of understanding it. I'm not even asking you to trust me. I'm just not giving you a choice. You're safe here."


	7. Chapter 7

She entered the kitchen area, fully clothed, finding him seated at the table, drinking what was likely coffee. He looked up at her while sipping, without a word. She finally decided to sit down at her end. For a long while there was just silence between them, until he finally pushed a folded newspaper across the table, as if it was bait in a test, studying what she would do.

"They still make these, you know.", he casually remarked when she didn't take it. "These grand visionaries, narrating their warnings and assurances..."

"You're crazy.", she said.

He just calmly shrugged, pouting his lower lip: "'Guilty as charged', I guess."

"You know that I don't really want to be here - that I don't even like you."

There was a brief pause, before he finally concluded: "There's no point to these accusations, is there?"

"Maybe it's that you have no shame, yet you think you're so much better than them - so much different - yet you've appointed yourself to 'save me'."

"...and you'd rather have chosen somebody else to spend your life with, is that it?", he genuinely wondered. "Another human being, I mean."

She fell silent, desperately searching her head for anything but grisly visages of monsters, but she quickly gave up.

He just stared at her. "Is there anybody else that comes to mind?", he asked, again as if toying with her. She lowered her head in response.

"You've remembered what they do to people by now, don't you?", he continued. "...gaining their trust... ...eating them..."

"This isn't fair.", she said through clenched teeth.

"Oh hogwash. Now who's talking crazy?", he said, opening the newspaper.

"I hate everything about you."

"If you must. Hate is a healthy emotion, after all. It's what makes us human.", he said without looking up from the paper.

His complete nonchalance unfuriated her to no end. She just sat there, boiling with rage at it, until he finally looked up at her again. Folding the newspaper under his arm, he walked over to her.

"Stand up.", he ordered her. She did, telling herself that she preferred looking him in the face than in his crotch.

He slowly extended a finger and gently moved a strand of her hair behind her ear, and once again she found herself uncapable of doing nothing but look away and shiver throughout her entire body.

"I love you no matter what.", he told her. "You know that. ...and these little blunt pretenses of yours, is why."

She couldn't help but blush at the words from this bastard.

"We ravage everything pure in this world, in attempts at smearing this purity all over ourselves, hoping it will somehow seep into our souls.", he continued. "...and I have to admit, that that's what I'm hoping to do with you." He carefully traced her eyebrow with his index finger.

At this point her rage had given way shame: Her pussy was aching down there, slowly seeping into the white cotton panties he'd given her.

This so wasn't fair.

Why didn't he just take her and get it over with?


	8. Chapter 8

She came to on her mattress. ...alone.  
Remembering, she darted her hand down between her legs, and felt a surprising disappointment when she found a lack of his semen.  
Whatever had occured after she blacked out, he hadn't wanted her fully to take advantage of her.  
She turned over, sighing through her lips. She had forced her to settle for him, and yet didn't show any interest in satisfying her, and it bugged her in a way that she didn't know was possible. He was more interested in her face - in studying her like a lab rat, as if her was trying to pry into her mind.

As she sat down, spreading her ass cheeks, the view from the toilet presented a vertigo of its own. Across the expanse of concrete cast floor, she could see her "bed", far off in the distance.  
She had passed the first loaf before the door opened. The man entered, and didn't even blink at his own bad timing, but began strolling straight for her.

"Really? Can't you see I'm busy?", she shouted, cursing herself for not putting on the shirt.

"Oh don't let me interrupt.", he said with a kind smile. "A woman pooing is a natural state that women take for granted, but a rare sight to behold for the average man." He didn't sound like he was referring to himself.

She wanted the satisfaction to tell him that she was done, but she felt that she still had another thick loaf to push out.

He walked right up to her and kneeled to her eye level, with his usual lack of acknowledgement for her personal space. "I imagine it's close to giving birth, and I want to see it happen.", he said in a soft tone.

His intrusion disgusted her, and soon her shyness fell away before anger. Feeling a strange sensation of defiance, she stared back into his watching eyes and pushed, as hard as she could. To her surprise, he softly grabbed the underside of her chin, letting it rest in his hand. "That's it.", he whispered. "Puuush... Push it all out of you." She couldn't react to his words, busy doing exactly what he instructed her to. Finally she felt the end of it leave her and his hand let go.

"W-why?", she stammered in complete bewilderment.

"Because it pleases me.", he smiled. "No...", he caught himself. "It's actually more a case of getting to know you. The REAL you."

"You didn't fuck me last night.", she said, hoping he'd leave so that she could at least wipe her ass in peace.

"No, as cute as your theatrics were, my heart just wasn't in it."

"... Good."

"You don't sound very pleased with it."

She just gasped in shock at his nerve, and a moment later the roll of toilet paper sailed through the air past him.

Unphased, he just turned and picked it up. For a moment she really thought that he WOULD be the one to wipe her sphincter clean, but he just unceremoniously handed it back to her.

"You really are shameless.", she muttered. "Dogs have more shame than you have."

"Yes, well, that's a shame that we both have to bear now, isn't it?", he replied. "...just as I have to put up with your constant displays of defecation and your rape fantasies."


	9. Chapter 9

He pushed open the door, and there she was, chained to the wall with sturdy chains. ...if you could call it a "she". Her volatile skin was in a constant flux, shedding out of existence all around her, exposing the flesh beneath, but the focal point of her essence remained true enough.

He carefully approached it, stopping at good safe distance, as it monitored him, collecting its data like a machine.

He opened his mouth to speak, hesitated, then closed it again, continuing to search for words on its level.

"She doesn't want you.", it opened in his stead, its rustled, inhuman voice manufactured through sundering vocal cords.

"No, she doesn't.", he replied, staring out the small barred window. "You could actually say that she hates me." He looked at it, waiting for a reply that didn't come, before continuing. "...but she will come around, inevitably."

It chuckled sadistically to itself.

"You know...", he said. "In a way, you are perhaps my biggest failure."

"How so?", it produced, humoring him.

"Because all you'd ever amount to, would be the skin of your face."

"You underestimate yourself.", it seductively croaked through the phlegm.

"No.", he reflected. "I know you better than that. SHE... ...knows you better than that.", he said, changing the subject.

"I am not your mother."

"True. None of you ever really are.", he said. "You spawn. You kill. You hunt. ...sometimes through speech like this. ...but caring for children is beyond you."

"I rendered you because you were weak, and yet you blame ME."

"Oh we were both responsible.", he replied, ignoring her accusation. "I saw the good in all things back then, and I decided on being a fool, and I do finally take my responsibility as a father, after all these years, though it's been hard."

She emitted more hoarse chuckling at his parental delusions.

"You'll break her too.", she croaked. "...just like me."

"Perhaps.", he said. "Maybe she'll become your grandchild."

"You always break things. It's the only way that you get to fuck me."

"Crude.", he remarked. "You know as well as I do, that love is beyond your understanding."

"I love to kill.", it argued. "They look like little children when they plead for their lives."

This was as far as he'd entertain her. He turned to leave.

"Release me!", it commanded. "I'll fuck you real good, I promise."

Now it was his turn to laugh, as he made his exit.


	10. Chapter 10

Her lubricated fingers slowly and gently traced over every hill and crevice of his magnificent sphincter. She removed the unwanted flake and hair that she found, and then reveled in having free and unlimited access to roam wherever she wanted between his cheeks. While his sphincter was smooth, the place further up was coarser, filled with embedded flakes. She carefully coerced them to leave him with two of her nails, but settled for simply covering them in ointment and letting it work.

In a demonstration of her newfound power, she went back to his sphincter and teasingly pushed a finger over his opening, feeling him shift. "This is what you're afraid of, right?", she said in a soft tone into his ear. "...getting sexual?"

"We're both scared of eachother." He turned to look into her eyes. "...and we SHOULD be. Losing ourselves is something that we only get to do once."

Her fingers made slow victory laps around his firmly puckered mountain. "You know, I don't even remember what my own anus feels like, if I've ever known it.", she mused. "Isn't that funny? ...that your anus is everything I know?"

"Perhaps we'll explore it one day. ...together.", he said, letting her continue.


	11. Chapter 11

"The human race. There's been much confusion about that concept throughout the ages, because we've never been ready to admit that we're just animals at heart." He turned to her. "...so no, we're not merely 'human'. Humanity in all its putrid glory, is out there somewhere, eating its own. You and I...", he gazed out through the small window. "...is something more... ...than that - more civilized." He turned to face her again. "...although I'll have to admit that the bar for what's human has been lowered in the last fifty years too. ...wouldn't you agree?"

She couldn't bring herself to nod as she silently struggled for anything to use against him.

"...and so with this inane primitive worship of humanity and all its human beings coming to an end,", he continued. "we have to redefine ourselves as something more than just 'dēmos'."

"That's why they're killing us, isn't it?"

"Yes. We were given a choice between a slow extermination, and a fast one, and now it seems that we've reached the inevitable end." He looked at her. "...but I don't blame them for this. It was we who let them out, we who let them walk among us, our magicians who shamed themselves by betraying their secrets, and so on. We... ...squandered our gift, we... ...lost faith in ourselves, subjugated by the very goddess that we looked to for our salvation."

"Are you telling me you've found another?"

He just looked at her and gave her an amused smile. "There's no hiding things from you, is there?"

 

He took her to the crack, its black smoke bellowing out from the wall. "This is the best I can do.", he explained. "This is the truth that she's been distracting us from for millenias. This is the gate to the third dimension."

Instinctively, like a child, she reached out for it.

"Are you quite sure you want to do that?", he asked, a warning tone in his voice.

She looked at him with hesitation.

"There's things in there that will rip your mind apart.", he explained. "...or perhaps heal it, depending on how you define sanity. ...but once you submerge, you won't be the same after that, and it would be a shame to lose that part of you yet."

She withdrew her hand, perceiving his disapproval.

"Still, it's your choice. Now that I've shown it to you, it will be here, waiting for when the time is ready.", he said, turning to leave.


	12. Chapter 12

She was surprised to find that he wasn't alone this morning. It was the only other person she'd seen since her capture, and from the looks of it, it was another captured girl.

He noticed her. "I caught her while you were sleeping. I thought you'd want to have a look at the more 'human' side of things."

She slowly approached the woman, who looked to be in her late twenties. She struggled with fury, but the invisible bonds kept her in place, reminding her of her own initial immobility. If it wasn't for the animousity towards her, she'd almost pity the girl.

"This... ...is what's left of the bulk of the civilized world.", the man said, firmly grabbing the girl's jaw to hold her head still, turning it over, studying her face like a specimen. With his other hand he raised a pen and tapped it on her forehead between her eyebrows. "Frontal lobe basically intact - no significant deterioration - yet feral, under a veneer of superficial conduct."

"Confusion?", she guessed.

"Very observant." He let go of the girl, who proceeded to struggle. "You're quite right. This is the product of the false goddess: Ingrained brainwash. A denial of who we are. ...yet..."

"You don't think she can be saved?", she continued his sentence.

"No, I'm afraid not.", he said. "She's too far gone, yet in her own mind she doesn't even understand that she's lost herself. She would live a normal life, donating to charities and what-not, but the moment she spots us, she will hunt us down and kill us. She sees us as an anomaly, hostile to her world. Her sanity hinges on that we die."

He picked up a scalpel, but then changed his mind and offered it to her instead, without a word.

"Please... Don't...", she pleaded for the girl. "This..." This was too much, but the clump in her throat prevent her from forming further words.

He shrugged and obliged her, putting the scalpel down to her relief, while the girl continued to struggle as if nothing had happened. Then he stepped aside and gestured for her to step forward and give the girl a go.

Just like he had done, she grabbed her jaw and began her study. The mouth had been frozen in a sneer. The eyes beamed with mistaken righteous, murderous fury. "Are... Are you still in there, somewhere?", she asked the girl. She got no response. Imagining that the girl would be humane toward anybody but her, was jarring.

"We are the true heirs of life.", he explained. "These people, as convincing as they may be, are nothing but living mockeries of us, meant to replace us. They're the best that Iustitia can do."

"...yet they're not enough. ...right?"

He sighed, hands in his pockets. "No, I'm afraid not. They'll keep playing their roles until the very end, thinking they did their very best, and after that there will be nuclear fire and oblivion. Facilitators."

She grabbed the scalpel from the table, and then looked at him. "I hope you understand that once I do this, she will forsake me."

"It is the ultimate taboo. It's not something to be taken lightly.", he said. "I'm not expecting you to do anything that you don't feel is necessary."

She sighed, as sadness and vertigo filled her heart and mind. She felt like she finally took a step out from the edge of a cliff, and let herself fall into an ocean below - an ocean that would wash her of everything she'd ever known, for the hope of for once doing something truly right.

The small blade sank through the girl's skin with almost no resistence, and slid inside the girl's throat. The girl moaned from the pain, and black-red blood soon began to spill. Slowly she let the blade slide a path, opening the dams to free the life trapped inside the false structure. The girl's eyes were wide now, because for the first time - here on the brink of death - she saw the true goddess, and too late she understood all the wrongs she'd committed her life to, as her life blood soaked her shirt.

Once the girl was nothing but a lifeless body, she put down the scalpel and silently hugged her. This girl had done nothing wrong, but putting her down was all that could be done for her. The man stood by her in solemn silence and just watched her cling to the girl, crying out her sorrow for the girl's forsaken life. Once she let go, their shirts tearing the girl's coagulated bloodstain apart, she turned and sought comfort in his arms instead. She had renounced the only goddess she'd ever known, and now she was an outcast, born again as a child to something she could barely understand yet.


	13. Chapter 13

Even while secured in this captive state, her first sight of the impossibly flagrating creature at the far wall of the chamber, made her gasp with shock.

He stood by her side, calmly waiting for her to come to terms with the nature of her own situation.

"How much of it is... ...real?", she carefully asked him.

"It's like a statue.", he explained, eyeing the creature. "You take a full block of the material, and out of it you shape something new, by stripping away the undesirable. ...and out of something real, you have created a mirage, that is but a half truth."

"You made her?"

He gave out a sigh that was suddenly heavy with sorrow. "Not... ...exactly."

"I'm sorry - I didn't mean to upset you."

Staring down into the floor, he continued: "These things act like the mirrors of your soul. Lacking their own, they artistically assume what you want them to be, in order to draw you in."

She stared at it hanging there, as if it suffered.

"Approach carefully, if at all.", he cautioned. "You'll see every face you've ever loved and trusted."

"I'll know it's not really them.", she convinced herself.

He gave her a peering look that stopped her: "Really? How so?"

"Well, they'd never...", she began, but his look penetrated her defenses. ...and then, through the fog, she began to remember, back to all the things he'd told her - that he'd tried to warn her about - before he'd brought her here, and the horrible realization began to sink in: "She was... ...all of them."

He slowly nodded: "Your closest friends... Your mother..."

When her knees gave out, he was suddenly there to catch her, lowering her down to the floor into his lap.

"It's okay. I was there too.", he said, as the world spun in her head. "We are going the way of the Dodo, and many of us don't survive even our first encounter."

"I barely even knew my father.", she told him.

"I know."

"Please don't leave me.", she whimpered.

"I won't." He gave her a hugging squeeze. "I brought you here to take care of you."

Together they both looked at the creature hanging there, currently unresponsive, acknowledging how it had so utterly fooled them.


	14. Chapter 14

The rain poured down over the wide stretches of land outside the wide balcony where they stood.

"It's almost tangible.", she admitted. "A blade, diagonally splitting my head into two divides. It's more than a feeling."

He stared off into the far distance before turning to her: "Let's hope that isn't true."

She gave him a disheartened look in return.

"I wouldn't worry too much about it. I imagine that it's part of the process."

"It's all so confusing."

He nodded. "Yes, that is something I can relate to. It took me decades to come around - to break... ...the conditioning."

"Did you really mean it?"

He gave her an inquisitive look.

"What you said back there, about me not being capable of doing wrong anymore?"

He looked to the sky. "A free heart that is also pure, can do no wrong. It's not in your nature."

"I feel like you made me into a bird, flying in the midst of the sky. Everywhere I turn is a vertigo of possibilities."

He said nothing.

"Aren't you going to say something?"

"There's no need to anymore."

She took a deep breath. "I wonder: Is there hope? ...for... ...us? Humanity?"

He turned to her with an amused smile. "There's hope for YOU. I'd say that's a good start." He turned to go inside. "When you look out over the horizon, the trick is to never lose yourself in the clouds." He turned to her. "Humanity made its choice a long time ago. We are just making different ones."

"I am going to kill so many people.", she said. "I can feel it in my heart - in my being."

"Yes, soon you'll be a fully realized killer. Scary, isn't it?"

She fell silent with a blush.

"You have trusted in my cleansing of your soul, and from now on you have my trust in your own ability. You have strengths, but also weaknesses. Explore yourself. Don't cling to words to define you - you are above such things now."


End file.
